The best place to start work on the web just got better. The Reporter's Desktop, a noncommercial and collaborative Web site aimed at making U.S. and Canadian journalists' work faster and easier, moved from a personal server to www.reporter.org/desktop a site hosted by IRE.
For those who have 18 million bookmarks, this is for you. For novices, this is for you, too. The Reporter's Desktop, or RD, is a slim, flat site, lean and mean, built for speed. There is only one layer beneath the desktop, an optional page of details about the great tools on top.
All of the tools themselves are free. I will be frank. These tools are borrowed. I do not say stolen, because I am quite sure companies don't mind. No one has objected so far.
I hate to sound like your boss, but: This is for serious work. The RD has no headlines, stocks, weather or sports scores. This is some of what the Reporter's Desktop offers:
Easy door-to-door directions with the two best forms from MapQuest and MapBlast. The single best White Pages, Yellow Pages, and e-mail lookup I could find. Medline, 9 million scientific and medical studies, abstracted. A gold mine for facts and sources. Hoover's, a great resource to sketch a company on deadline and find news, finances and competitors. Northern Light, still my favorite search engine with its folders system and special documents. Others: Ask Jeeves! seemed silly but it's great. Yahoo is the old standby. The new Google is huge. I'm evaluating www.alltheweb.com What's not there is just as important. I weed the RD ruthlessly. It needs to load fast. If you want comprehensive or specialized lists, check out the mega-bookmark sites instead. At a reporters' conference, somebody asked me suspiciously, "What's in this for you?" So cynical! I get nothing but the best Web page I can design to launch my own work, and the pleasure of trying to keep up with the best reporting tools on the Web.
Duff Wilson can be reached by e-mail at dwilson@seattletimes.com